Yet More on a Farmhouse Garden
Thanks to everyone who commented. I was somewhat surprised at the unanimous judgement that running a decent vegetable garden is a lot of effort and doesn’t even yield free food.
Adam I agree about the problem of gluts. Our fruits were pretty staggered but even so . . . And the expense of putting up fruit and vegetables. I’ve always vaguely wondered why Americans (at least so I read) canned vegetables and we never did. I think probably there were two reasons.
First, we could just about squeak fresh vegetables through the winter though by April my father expressed everyone’s view when he said he yearned for something green. I don’t think that would have been so easy in the northern United States.
Second, the equipment for canning vegetables was pretty expensive. We canned (bottled) fruits but because they were in syrup it did not need a pressure cooker or even lots of jars. A special order went in to the grocer in the nearby small town for large quantities of preserving sugar.
And for jam we never, ever bought jars. Every possible jar (and there were not many bought jars because we did not buy things in jars) was saved and the collection grew over the years. I recall on a discussion list someone asking who would hoard old jars? Well, the entire British population post World War II, that’s who. Frantic visits to relatives when you ran out of jars. The jam was topped by a bit of wax paper. If some mold grew, well we scraped it off.
And choice, Laura, Karen, Kay, and Cindy is something I have thought about a lot. Almost anything (including as Laura points out, husbands and children) takes time and space. So my feeling about gardening is if it gives you pleasure or it is necessary take the time to do it properly. But we are lucky to have the choice of not doing it, something my mother would have dearly loved. I don’t vest having a garden with great moral punch. And that’s lucky because I have just moved too much in my life to ever have the garden I simply assumed I would. I’m currently self sufficient in ginger, bay leaves, limes, lemon grass and a few other herbs and the curry tree is coming along nicely. But batting between two cities means it’s just not worth growing vegetables and most fruits.
Which leads me to a bit of a puzzle, Ji-Young, about school gardens. I can see they make sense to teach children something about where food comes from in California with its long growing season. But if you are in the northern US then school vacations coincide with the most active garden time (and not coincidentally I assume). So what do the children see? Seeds going in the ground. Then the second part of harvest? But your points about serious policy versus rhetoric are very well taken.
And Maria, you probably have the best garden of the lot of us. I love reading about it. And no chemicals is a tough road. I don’t even think it’s the right road but me might disagree about that.
Finally, that was one lucky peacock. I’ve never tasted peacock, unlike you Adam, but had I been older and a food historian I might have prevailed on my parents to kill it. As it was, no one ever turned up from some local stately home to collect the thing though we put the word out. And no one had the heart to wring its neck. So yes it made an awful noise. And it got the best of the young plants all too often. But it did look rather stunning with the petals drifting down from the apple trees.
“Which leads me to a bit of a puzzle, Ji-Young, about school gardens. I can see they make sense to teach children something about where food comes from in California with its long growing season. But if you are in the northern US then school vacations coincide with the most active garden time (and not coincidentally I assume). So what do the children see? Seeds going in the ground. Then the second part of harvest?”
I suppose they will learn that local and seasonal just doesn’t work as a meta-prescription. In all seriousness, they could implement technologies such as hydroponics, greenhouses, etc.. or just not have school gardens at all in these regions.
I’m not supportive of the idea that all schools should or need to have gardens. So far, I’ve seen more waste than productive outputs. (I’ll save comments about how $$$ is spent for another post). And I have a whole bunch of issues with assumptions made by Slow Food.
I’ve been working with kids here in Los Angeles in school gardens. Yes, we have a year round growing season, even so school breaks here and there interfere with planting/harvest schedules. Still, we’re probably going to have several harvests this school year.
The biggest benefits I see the kids reaping are a sense of community (I think this has more to do the instructor than the garden itself), they tend to become more careful about not wasting food, many actually start eating more vegetables, some build more confidence as they learn how to work in a group, they learn to care for a living thing, they learn environmental stewardship and so on.
i’m not sure if i should laugh or cry about the jar hoarding – if i weren’t a jar hoarder myself, i would never have been able to do this: http://organicallycooked.blogspot.com/2008/11/winter-stock-up.html
that was in november – four months later, the top layer of jars has disappeared. i notice that i only buy fruit, onions and potatoes from the fresh produce section at the supermarket, and all because i have been hoarding jars: some of them have been with me since before my marriage (ten years ago!!!)
i must do a fun post about this and link up to this post
Ji-Young,
Not quite the comment I expected. It’s always good to be surprised. So (a) you think where the school year misses harvest, then there may be no point in school gardens. And (b) that school gardens in any case don’t teach much about food production (at least immediately) and that other non-food values are the major result.
Am I mis-interpreting?
Maria, Last time I visited my sister in England, she said, oh we need something to put this in. And she nipped up to the spare bedroom, pulled a cardboard box out from under the bed, and extracted one of many, many jars. I was not surprised.
Nope, you’re not mis-interpreting. I can also see the benefits of hands-on, service and project based learning. And learning about science in context.
And about the jars, very common in Korean households. Even with modern food processing, or rather to complement, lots of new kinds of preserved food containers have been developed. When I was a child we used a lot of clay containers, then it was big mason jars, after that plastic with special airtight lids.
she hides them under the bed? my husband has found all my hiding places – he now rounds up all the jars and puts them in the basement